I love how governments love to pretend that either none of these crimes happened prior to the digital communication age or that they never caught anyone prior t

I love how governments love to pretend that either none of these crimes happened prior to the digital communication age or that they never caught anyone prior to it (which they definitely did). Let's also take a step back and consider the series of events and how this would play into that. Under normal circumstances, you need a warrant/reason to look at such data and communications. The theory here is that if they could decrypt everything that would make their job much easier. Fair point. But in the world 20-30 years ago these tools never existed so there was no such communication to capture. Which means the evidence was non-existent. Yet, through other means of investigation they were able to identify and gather evidence against these criminals and prosecute them. How did they do that? It's because these are real world crimes (meaning not purely residing in the digital world) so there is real world evidence to be gathered. And all the other methods they have without decrypting data still applies. That can mean tracking credit card charges, phone calls, cell tower pings, etc, etc. As we know, they can build out quite a substantial profile of a criminal network in that manner. They can correlate all sorts of things and gather insights into the data. This is just government pulling a classic fear-mongering bullshit tactic wrapped in a "think about the children!" plea to simply make their lives easier while simultaneously trying to whittle down our privacy rights even further.